Smit has maintained the DNA found under 6-year-old beauty queen JonBenet’s fingernails and in her underwear doesn’t match anyone in her family.

But after weeks of wrangling, Kane finally called Smit before the secret panel – and soon after, the grand jury came back with a list of questions it wanted answered, including how to explain the DNA, Newsweek said.

Other last-minute witnesses who might have pushed the panel away from indicting the parents were John Douglas, a former FBI profiler hired by the couple who says they don’t fit the killer mold, and the couple’s kids, Newsweek reported.

With the parents off the grand-jury hook, they now appear ready to exact revenge on the tabloid media, Newsweek said. The couple has hired Atlanta libel lawyer L. Lin Wood, who represented Richard Jewell, the man wrongly blamed for the 1996 Olympics bombing.

Also yesterday, it was reported John Ramsey intends to find his daughter’s killer himself.

“I’m getting the impression that he himself will be involved as a manager of the thing,” Ramsey family friend Jim Marino told the Denver Rocky Mountain News.

“John’s hope is the DNA. He hopes that there will be a match someday to someone who gets arrested on a felony, or a drug charge; they end up testing his DNA and they get a match.

“He believes, and I believe, that that’s probably going to be the answer – unless, possibly, someone confesses.”

The Ramseys, who are still considered under an “umbrella of suspicion” in the cops’ probe of the murder, have said before they intend to find the killer.

But ex-FBI profiler Gregg McCrary says it isn’t likely.

“They don’t have the resources that law enforcement has,” he said. “They don’t have the capabilities that legitimate law enforcement investigators have.”